I'm reading a Noam Chomsky essay today for a lingustics class. It's called "On language and the mind." Apparently Chomsky is seen, at least by academics in the Usa, as one of the most respected thinkers these days when it comes to issues of language, and neuroscience.

I can see why he's popular - he prods you to think in all manner of interesting ways about the elements of thinking and of the brain that you wouldn't have thought to muse about, without his prompting. He's very philosophical in his tone. Everything in this essay reflects speculation. He says, "Since we know x, shouldn't we consider y, and doesn't it follow that z?" It's good for the soul to think deeply about the things that writers like that suggest to you. However, it is not what I would call a "scientific pursuit."

One problem which I'm seeing with many academics, is that they want to approach a subject as an outsider, and try to figure it out in that manner. I would compare that to a person in the 1850s, who had never been to Japan, but who wanted to muse about what life must be like there. The person, with no first hand knowledge will invariably be wrong. The fact that he gets his audience to think about all the possibilities, and all the interesting nuances of things doesn't make him any more right.

If people want to understand how babies and toddlers develop language skills, there is only one way to find out. They have to remember clearly the day to day experiences and thoughts that they themselves experienced in those years of their own lives.

The other classic failing I see in Chomsky's musings is the one which happens when scientists desperately seek out whatever body of data is available and erroneously assume that will offer a direct way to assess the thing that they want to study. Scientists know that they cannot do science without data. So they will hastily seize upon any data set they can get their hands on, without thinking clearly about whether or not this data can actually be used to assess the things that they want to look at. In Chomsky's case, the data set he is fond of is the structure of grammar. And because that is what he is so focused on examining, he jumps to the conclusion that the mind computes grammar as it hears or reads or thinks or speaks words.

I think that this is obviously untrue. I was an exchange student in West Berlin Germany back in highschool, and one lesson about language was hammered in while I was there. Each word has its own qualities and those qualities are known, individually. Nouns, in German are each associated with masculinity, feminity, or the idea of a neutral identity. There is no rhyme or reason as to why nouns are assigned the gender which they are. It's simply a quality that is associated with that noun in the mind of everyone who is raised with the German language. The spelling of words in english is a similar kind of thing. There is no rhyme nor reason to it. You simply associate the spelling with the individual word. It would seem to me then, that the mind has an infinite capacity for words. When you think of a word, the idea of how it is spelled presents itself to you.

Three examples that Chomsky uses in his essay are these simple sentences:

• I told John to leave.

• I expected John to leave.

• I persuaded John to leave.

And then Noam takes the reader into a jungle gym of grammar analysis... where he shows how different each sentence is, although all three appear almost identical. I would say that understanding the grammar is a nice intellectual pursuit, but it is entirely unnecessary for the thinker or speaker. As my linguistics professor pointed out on the first day of class - using language is like driving a car: you don't need to know how the engine works, in order to use it as a tool every day of your life.

The fact is, that words are used to accomplish goals - and there are two sorts of goals - to communicate or to think (Thank you, Vygotsky for pointing this very important distinction out to me the other day in another essay which I read!). Those three sentences above are the type of things you would put together in order to communicate with someone something important. First you simply start with "I" - which is yourself. Then, you use a verb and an object which communicates the specific event that you want to talk about. The predicate "to leave" is like a modular part that can be placed onto any number of different types of sentences. It's handy that our language has such modular phrases like that.